


Salt

by Sheeana



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-07
Updated: 2012-05-07
Packaged: 2017-11-04 23:37:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/399473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheeana/pseuds/Sheeana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the war, Johanna leaves District 7. Annie teaches her to be patient.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sabaceanbabe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabaceanbabe/gifts).



> I had trouble figuring out an exact timeline from the books, so I had the war end in winter. Warning for references to past torture and past consent issues (though nothing more graphic than in the books).

The snow is thick on the ground when Johanna Mason leaves District 7 forever. 

On the morning she's due to leave, she rises early and pulls on her winter coat, her boots, and her gloves. She has a satchel prepared, hanging by the door. As she leaves, she takes it and swings it over her shoulder like an afterthought.

The road is clear but the path she takes, through an opening in the pine thicket by the butcher's shop, is snowed over. The going is slow, but she climbs up the steep incline to the clearing above the merchant district. She trudges through the knee-deep snow until she comes to an unmarked spot between two trees, no different from the rest of the clearing. It's the first time she's come here in years.

She digs through the snow until she finds the blank, smooth stones set into the ground in a carefully arranged pattern. Her fingers ache through her gloves by the time she's finished, but she doesn't stop until they're fully uncovered. She kneels at her parents' grave and places a wreath of pine and berries over the frozen ground. She painstakingly prepared it with her own hands, shaping the branches and tying them with twine, swearing every time the rough wood cut into her skin. It's lopsided and ready to break apart at the slightest mishandling. Sitting on the ground where she cleared away the snow, over the rocks, it seems fitting.

She doesn’t go to see the others. Her aunt, her cousins, the boy she might have married. Even their names won't come to her lips anymore. She remembers, but she wants to forget.

The trek back to the town goes faster than the climb to the grave. When she emerges from the forest and arrives on the main street, the shops are still closed, the paths still clogged with snow. The train is already waiting at the station. 

No one comes to say goodbye.

She presses her forehead to the cold glass of the window and watches the wooden buildings disappear behind her, soon obscured by the trees. She wonders if she should feel sentimental, but this hasn't been her home in a long time. She already knows she’s never going back.

-

Getting permission to travel is easy now. All she had to do was ask, and a week later she had the papers in her pocket. Maybe being one of the last living victors of the Games helped. Maybe it was her connection to the rebels. Johanna has always cared more about results than methods, though, so she didn't question it very much.

The train is empty except for her and a few workers headed to the Capitol or the more devastated districts. She chooses a vacant car and no one bothers her. After they wind their way slowly through the valley until they've left the mountains, they stop once in District 5 to let off some passengers and take on a few more. Eventually the snow gives way to bare land and budding leaves, and then finally the train leaves the forest entirely. On the final day of their journey, she stares out the window at the ocean as they make their way along the coast, and she tries desperately not to panic. It's not that she hasn't seen it before, because she has. It's not even the size of it, or the way the waves crash onto the rocks. It's the water – so much water, too much water when Johanna can barely handle washing herself with a wet cloth. She has nightmares when she dozes in her seat, of curved metal blades and rough hands and electricity racing through her body. She comes awake sweating and shivering, and doesn't let herself sleep again while the train moves.

Their final destination is the train station of District 4. She steps out of the train to find a place flatter and emptier than she remembers from her last time here, on her Victory Tour. The town is a collection of wooden buildings on sandy hills alongside a stretch of sandy beach. In the distance she can make out the beginnings of a forest, but the trees near the town are short and scrubby, with red bark and leaves shaped like daggers. The air is so heavy with humidity she can faintly taste salt on it.

Not home. But better than staying in 7 and pretending.

-

For the first month Annie hardly speaks a word. Johanna buys a small house not far from hers, but far enough away from the beach that the thought of flooding doesn't keep her awake every night. After her first two disastrous tries to get Annie to do anything other than sit and stare out her window, she changes tactics and chooses to wait. She remembers the numbness of grief, and she remembers that it didn't last forever.

Her hair starts to grow back. She decides not to cut it again until she can forget the sharp pain she felt when they yanked it out and left her scalp bloody and smooth. The scars on her skin begin to fade, but the worst ones, the burns on her back and thighs - they never will. She spends her time alone, carving shavings of wood off pieces of driftwood she finds in the hills, reading books from the makeshift library they've assembled in the Justice Building, trying to think about anything but electricity and water and blood. 

She wakes one night, about four weeks after her arrival, to the sound of screaming. For a terrible, disorienting moment, she's in her cell in the Capitol, and it's Peeta Mellark screaming while they burn out his memories and replace them with lies. She thrashes in her sheets and falls to the floor beside her bed, desperate to get away, to make it stop somehow.

But she's learned to find ways to figure out what's real and what isn't. She goes through what she knows, one thing at a time, until it starts to fit together. She can taste salt on the air. The tips of her hair brush against her neck. Her wrists are unbound. She isn't in the Capitol. Peeta's not here. She's in District 4, in her house. The scream came from somewhere else. Sound carries near the water.

Then she's on her feet, not even bothering to find her shoes as she rushes out, pausing only long enough to lock her door behind her. Annie's house is at the top of a grassy hill, across from Finnick's, set above the rest of the Victor's Village. Johanna sprints up the hill, regretting letting her training lapse after the end of the war. She's panting by the time she reaches Annie's door and finds it locked. The window beside it is open, so Johanna slips through into the darkened house without a second thought. She finds Annie in her bedroom on the second floor, lying in bed and trembling. She doesn't seem alarmed by Johanna's presence. She's still too lost in the place she always goes in her mind.

“I was drowning. Finnick drowned. Everything's burning,” Annie says, her eyes wide and blank. None of it makes sense – except all of it makes perfect sense, and Johanna hates that it does. Slowly, she lowers herself to sit beside Annie on the bed, and reaches out to touch her hair. She doesn’t know how to do this, but she doesn’t have a choice. Finnick is dead.

“Is it real?” Annie asks breathlessly, meeting Johanna's eyes.

“No,” Johanna says, smoothing back her hair. She can't lie. Not to Annie. She's told enough lies in her life already. She can't say it was never real, that it was all just a dream. “Not anymore.”

–

They start to spend their days together. Annie speaks haltingly and sparingly at first, and Johanna doesn't know how to coax anything else out of her, but the silence isn't so bad when they're sharing it. Annie is one of the only people left in the world who knows the same horrors as Johanna.

–

In District 7, it only rained a few times a month, and only in the late spring and summer. In 4 it rains every few days, in light drizzles or steady sheets or torrential downpours, alternating almost violently with bright, clear days. Johanna finds herself constantly confined to her house when clouds appear in the sky. She's getting better with bathing, but rain still forces the memories. 

After three sunny, rainless days following three weeks of almost constant rain, Annie takes her out and teaches her to choose the right shellfish in the market. She doesn't eat them herself, but Johanna has grown to like the sweet and salty taste. Not like anything they had in 7. They always skirt the stream running through the town when they go out together. The bubbling water makes them both uneasy. When Annie gets too close, once, she hides her face and starts talking frantically about drowning. Johanna pulls her away as fast as she can. They never talk about it. Johanna thinks she understands why. Neither of them want to think about it.

They're caught unaware when the rain starts in the market. Johanna swears loudly as the first droplets hit her. Her eyes widen and it hurts to breathe. Not here. She can't let this happen here, in front of Annie, who's trying so hard to put herself back together.

Annie is already shaking. It's enough for Johanna to pull herself together as much as a broken person can. She takes Annie's hand and they run, leaving all their purchases to soak in the rain. They take shelter in the first place they can find, a shanty built to keep wood dry near the new building for housing guests from other districts.

“I don't want to go back,” Annie is saying, trembling, her hands tight over her ears, crouched beside Johanna.

“We're not going back,” Johanna says grimly. “I won't ever let anyone make us go back.”

They wait out the rain in their makeshift shelter until it stops completely. When they emerge, their food is ruined, but they're safe, and Annie has stopped trembling. It's as much as Johanna can ask for anymore.

-

“I'm pregnant,” Annie says one morning, while they both sit on Annie's porch and stare aimlessly out at the hazy horizon where the ocean meets the sky. Johanna hasn't dared to go near the ocean yet. Even the thought makes her queasy.

She doesn't really need the confirmation of Annie's pregnancy. Her stomach is already visibly starting to swell. Johanna is just terrible at talking about anything. She never knows what to say. “Is that a good thing?” she asks carefully.

“Sometimes,” Annie says, and Johanna doesn't need to question her any further. She understands _sometimes_.

They fall into silence again. Insects buzz in the grass near the steps, and in the distance fishermen are shouting to each other on their boats, but Johanna and Annie don't say another word until the evening.

-

The people here think of the ocean as a person, Johanna discovers. They thank it for providing and blame it when things don’t go the way they want. It’s so irrational that she wants to shout at them to stop, but after the first time she tries it in the fish market, she realizes that it doesn’t work anyway. They believe in the sea the way the people in history books believed in people in the sky.

It takes her three months, but Annie finally convinces Johanna to go to the beach with her to watch the sunset. Johanna can barely keep herself upright as they make their way barefoot down the sandy hill by Annie's house. It's more like sliding than walking. Annie pulls her along anyway, until they reach the damp sand near the water, and then Johanna stops. They sit together, Annie with her legs stretched out, Johanna with hers curled safely under herself.

The tall sand grasses sway in the wind. It catches Johanna's hair and sends it flying into her eyes, but she stubbornly refuses to tie it back like the people of District 4. The water laps at Annie's toes. Whenever a wave comes in a little too close, Johanna stiffens, but as long as it doesn't touch her she doesn't back away.

“How can you stand it?” She stares at the water like it's on fire.

“I'm not afraid of the ocean,” Annie explains calmly. She traces meaningless shapes in the sand with her finger. “Sometimes the ocean is angry, and sometimes it's not. It only hurts people who can't tell the difference.”

“But you won't go near the fountain in the square.”

“When I was drowning, the water tasted like metal. Seawater tastes like salt.” 

Annie's logic always seems strange until Johanna thinks about it, and then it makes a kind of simple, refreshing sense no one else in Panem is capable of. “I can't stand it,” she says aimlessly.

“Finnick loved the ocean,” Annie murmurs. Her finger pauses in the sand.

It's the first time Johanna has heard Annie say his name without sobbing since she came to District 4. She expects more. Tears, screaming, begging. Confessions. Anything. Annie says nothing. Her eyes are on the horizon, distant and vacant. 

Johanna waits, but Annie is lost again.

-

The town doctor sent by the provisional government in the Capitol tells Annie she’s having a boy. He doesn't seem to know whether to congratulate her or apologize to her, so Johanna takes her hand and leads her out of the examination room before he can say anything else about it at all. All the Capitol equipment makes her feel trapped anyway.

They buy sweet candies in paper bags from the market and walk along the beach together. Even the candies have a salty taste behind the sweetness. Annie's fingers caress her belly. She has a look in her eyes – distant, but not the way she gets when she loses herself. Thoughtful, maybe.

“Here,” she says, stopping. She reaches for Johanna's fingers and brings them to her stomach. Johanna is about to tug her hand away when something nudges it. Then whatever she's about to say dies in her throat, and she can only stare at her fingers splayed out over Annie's belly. She's never been sentimental, but her chest aches in a way that both is and isn't like grief. It's too tangled, like gnarled roots, for her to tell the difference.

-

As Annie's stomach grows larger and larger, they go to the beach more and more often. Johanna stops feeling sick every time she looks at the water. The faucet still makes her recoil in fear, but Annie's right. Something is different about the ocean. 

When she mentions it to Annie while they sit in the sand near the water, Annie just smiles. “That's where Finnick is,” she says, and Johanna blinks, startled.

“Right,” she says cautiously. She has to be careful not to break Annie anymore than she's already been broken.

“That's where people go when they die. The ocean takes them back, deep under the water. I scattered his ashes in the ocean. When I die, he’ll be waiting there for me.” She sounds so convinced, believing and trusting in something in a way Johanna never did and never will. Johanna tries to imagine her on a boat, alone and grieving, in the weeks following the war, taken out to sea to drop Finnick's remains in the water. Just the thought of all that water surrounding her makes Johanna paralyzed with fear. She goes through her routine – taste the salt, feel the sand beneath her fingers. She's not in the Capitol. She's in District 4.

She's still distracted when Annie stands and takes a step forward, past the line where the water meets the sand. For a second Johanna is terrified she's going to try to drown herself, but she only wades out far enough for the water to submerge her feet. It's the furthest she's ever gone since Johanna got here.

“Trust me,” Annie says softly, stretching out her hand. It takes Johanna a moment to realize Annie's inviting her to join her. Annie's been trying to teach her something, trying to coax something out of her, and she hasn't noticed until now.

Once in awhile it occurs to Johanna that Annie was trained to manipulate and kill the same way Finnick was. It's funny – they were the Careers, and she was the one with no chance at all, and somehow they came out trusting, and she came out believing everyone wanted to hurt her. “I can't,” she tries to explain, feeling frustrated.

“It's okay. We have time.” Annie smiles.

Johanna thought she was the one doing the waiting, but it's always been Annie – waiting for herself to get better, waiting for Johanna to see that she isn't alone. She should have realized from Annie's Games - Annie knows how to bide her time. Johanna starts to wonder if Annie was the one keeping Finnick afloat all along.

-

They move Annie's things into his house together. It's bigger than hers, brighter, and he willed it to her with the rest of his belongings. Annie smiles sometimes when she talks about him now, while she rubs her stomach with her hand.

In his bedroom Johanna finds a locked cupboard. Annie finds the key under his pillow, and they open it together. It's filled with jars and bottles of scented oils and perfumes, powders and paints and plastic gems that stick to the skin. Johanna hates it so much and so viscerally that she slams it shut and retreats to the kitchen before Annie can say a word. She waits there until Annie joins her, a few minutes later, seemingly unaffected.

“Doesn't it bother you?” Johanna watches her for some sign of anger or sadness. Of anything.

“No,” Annie says, looking at her with an expression that resembles curiosity more than anything else. Sometimes Johanna wonders if it's something in the water, making the people from 4 more trusting than any of the other districts. “They always put sugar on his lips. It took days to wash it off. But it always came off.”

Johanna remembers disgust, at the scent of perfumes on his skin and the glossy shine of wax on his lips, but everything she feels about that is muted and distant now. The Capitol is far away. “They never did that to me,” she says finally, when she senses Annie is waiting for her to answer.

“They did other things to you,” Annie says gently, reaching for her hand. 

“Can we wash that off?” It comes out more bitterly than Johanna intends, but she lets Annie take and squeeze her hand.

“No. But we can build over it.” It's a reference to trees, and wood, not to the ocean, and suddenly Johanna's eyes sting. She turns away abruptly, but she lets Annie keep hold of her hand.

She realizes now that she was wrong before. Wrong about so many things. Annie was never broken, and Finnick was never helpless. She understands now. Sometimes it's worth giving yourself up to save someone else, but it's too late for Johanna to choose that.

-

The seasons pass differently here. Without the melting snow, Johanna doesn't even notice winter becoming spring until spring is already fading seamlessly into summer, until it's so hot it's hard to breathe. Annie never seems bothered by the heat, though. Some days she wakes screaming and spends the whole day crying. Some days she covers her ears with her hands and won’t listen to anything anyone says, so lost she can’t even seem to remember where she is. But not most days. Not anymore. Johanna is the one feeling lost now, trapped and frustrated with herself. It's as if her feet are stuck in the mud and she can't move forward.

One day she impulsively buys one of the white paper lanterns with candles inside the people from 4 use to bid farewell to their dead. She brings it home and it sits on her table, untouched. She loathes it when she sees it. She hates ceremony, and she hates thinking about people who are dead. She didn't attend her parents' burial or the memorial service after the war. She doesn't care about symbolic gestures and she doesn't believe anyone exists after they die. She should throw it away. But it stays on her table, and she keeps hating it.

-

“I want to teach him how to swim,” Annie says, while they prepare freshly bought fish together in Finnick's kitchen. Annie knows how to gut a fish expertly, the knife glinting as her hands move while she hardly looks at what she's doing. 

Johanna snorts. “You can't even go deeper than your feet in the water.”

“Someone has to teach him,” Annie says, insisting. She's never been this stubborn before. Johanna wonders if she's starting to rub off on her.

“There's lots of people who know how to swim.”

“Finnick would want it to be me.”

Johanna shakes her head and doesn't answer. Annie doesn't look hurt. If anything, she seems more determined. She chops up the fish and drops it into the water for the soup, and Johanna lets herself smile, a little.

-

A week later, Johanna decides the paper lantern can't sit on her table any longer. The old woman she bought it from told her to put something in it that reminds her of the person she lost. She doesn’t have anything of her parents, or her cousins, or anyone from 7. But during her first days in the Capitol after the war, after she arrived from 13, a soldier came to her room and presented her with Finnick's first aid kit, the only thing they found on his body. She figured Annie was still too lost in the raw grief of losing him to want to handle it, and it was just a first aid kit. She threw most of it out the moment she was alone, but there was a long strip of cloth meant to be used as a bandage that reminded her of the rope he used to tie knots in. She remembers wrapping it around her fingers, again and again, weaving it in and out, until she couldn't stop. She always meant to throw it out, but somehow it always stayed close to her. 

It's stupid. He probably never even touched it, or thought about it. It's just a bandage. But she has it with her, and it reminds her of Finnick. She drops it into the round body of the lantern beside the candle, but she feels compelled to carefully rearrange it five times before she's satisfied. 

The sky is dark with clouds by the time she reaches the beach, lantern in hand, but as long as it isn’t raining yet, she isn’t deterred by the weather. She kneels in the sand, as close to the water as she can force herself to get. It's a good thing she brought one of the electric fire-starters from the Capitol, because the wind is whipping around her too fiercely to light a match. Even with the fire-starter she has to bend low over the lantern and cup her hand over the opening to light the wick. Once she has it lit, she replaces the lid and seals it shut with the silk ribbons at either side. The flame inside flickers and casts eerie shadows on the sand.

She sets the lantern in the shallow water and nudges it with a driftwood stick until the water lifts it from the sand. She watches the white crests of the waves take it away as the storm closes in. Soon it’s swallowed by the sea, taking Finnick's strip of cloth to wherever Annie thinks he's waiting. It doesn’t take Johanna's memories with it, but she doesn’t want to lose them anymore.

She manages to get back inside just before the rain begins to fall on the roof.

-

It's still dark one morning in late summer when Annie comes to rouse Johanna from her bed. Her stomach is so round sometimes Johanna thinks she might fall over from the weight, but she doesn't. She's steady on her feet, even on the sand where Johanna always stumbles. Probably even on the wooden slats of the boats she grew up on, but she hasn't been on a boat since she gave Finnick's ashes back to the sea.

She takes Johanna's hand and guides her down the grassy hill to the beach. Johanna is still blinking sleep from her eyes when they reach the edge of the water. They sit in the damp sand and watch as the sky lightens and turns the darkness to a soft pink, like the flesh of grapefruit they both ate in the Capitol. Johanna tastes the salt on the air. 

When the sun has risen fully above the horizon, Annie pulls up her shirt and wades out until the waves touch her knees. She laughs and bends down to scoop up water to brush over her bare, swollen stomach. Someday, Johanna thinks, Annie is going to teach her son how to swim. Johanna inches forward until her feet touch the water. She lets the waves lap at her toes. Finnick loved the ocean.

 

 

-

“If anything ever happens to me,” Finnick says calmly. They're sitting together in the mentors' booth, watching the tribute parade in the City Circle. The Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games are about to begin. 

“Don't say that,” Johanna snaps, without looking up.

“Don't be naive.”

There's nothing Johanna hates more than being called naive, and he knows it. She glares at him and says nothing in response.

Finnick takes the opportunity to continue. “If anything ever happens to me, take care of Annie.”

Johanna gives him a look that suggests he might be insane. “Why me?”

“Because I trust you.”

“You shouldn't.”

“You think no one should trust anyone.”

“Am I wrong?” She glances at him, to see his expression, but he's sealed his face up tight. She can't read anything.

“Maybe,” he says, in a distant tone. “What if there were no Games?”

“You shouldn't listen to what Haymitch says. He's an old drunk.”

“And you're angry and alone, and Annie's lost her mind, and I'm the Capitol's favorite lover.” The bitter sarcasm in his tone is something Johanna has come to expect. It's his way of dealing with what they do to him, when no one's listening but her. She's never heard him use it with anyone else. They all learned to lock things away when they came out of the arena.

“And?” she says, as the chariots of District 7 come into view. Trees, always trees. Never anything new. She's bored already.

“I never thought Annie would smile again. I never thought I'd be able to touch anyone again without feeling sick. I never thought you'd make any friends.” His lips quirk.

“What's your point?” 

He turns back to the parade, and for a moment Johanna thinks he isn't going to answer. When he glances at her again, the look in his eyes is something she's never seen in anyone before. She can't place it. “You can think what you want,” he says. “I'd rather believe there might still be hope for all of us.”


End file.
